I Like Obama

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

B ERNARD RANG THE
DOORBELL at ten o’clock sharp. He wore faded blue shorts and a T-shirt several
sizes too small; in his hands was a bald orange basketball, held out like an
offering.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Almost. Give me a second to put on my shoes.”

He followed me into
the apartment and stepped over to the desk where I had been working. “You’ve
been reading again, Barry,” he said, shaking his head. “Your woman will get
bored with you, always spending time with books.”

I sat down to tie my sneakers. “I’ve been
told.”

He tossed the ball into the air. “Me, I’m not
so interested in books. I’m a man of action. Like Rambo.”

I smiled. “Okay,
Rambo,” I said, standing up and opening the door. “Let’s see how you do running
down to the courts.”

“Auma took it to
work.” I went out onto the veranda and started stretching. “Anyway, she told me
it’s just a mile. Good for warming up those young legs of yours.”

He followed me
halfheartedly through a few stretching exercises before we started up the
graveled driveway onto the main road. It was a perfect day, the sun cut with a
steady breeze, the road empty except for a distant woman, walking with a basket
of kindling on top of her head. After less than a quarter of a mile, Bernard
stopped dead in his tracks, beads of sweat forming on his high, smooth
forehead.

“I’m warmed up, Barry,” he said, gulping for
air. “I think now we should walk.”

The University of
Nairobi campus took up a couple of acres near the center of town. The courts
were above the athletic field on a slight rise, their pebbled asphalt cracked
with weeds. I watched Bernard as we took turns shooting, and thought about what
a generous and easy companion he’d been these last few days, taking it upon
himself to guide me through the city while Auma was busy grading exams. He
would clutch my hand protectively as we made our way through the crowded
streets, infinitely patient whenever I stopped to look at a building or read a
sign that he passed by every day, amused by my odd ways but with none of the
elaborate gestures of boredom or resistance that I would have shown at his age.

That sweetness, the
lack of guile, made him seem much younger than his seventeen years. But he was
seventeen, I reminded myself, an age where a little more independence, a
sharper edge to his character, wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I realized that he
had time for me partly because he had nothing better to do. He was patient
because he had no particular place he wanted to go. I needed to talk to him
about that, as I’d promised Auma I would-a man-to-man talk….

“You have seen Magic
Johnson play?” Bernard asked me now, gathering himself for a shot. The ball
went through the netless rim, and I passed the ball back out to him.

“Just on TV.”

Bernard nodded.
“Everybody has a car in America. And a telephone.” They were more statements
than questions.

“Most people. Not everybody.”

He shot again and
the ball clanged noisily off the rim. “I think it is better there,” he said.
“Maybe I will come to America. I can help you with your business.”

“I don’t have a business right now. Maybe
after I finish law school-”

“It must be easy to find work.”

“Not for everybody. Actually, lots of people
have a tough time in the States. Black people especially.”He held the ball. “Not as bad as here.”

We looked at each
other, and I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The
sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell-that was
one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their
mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures
collided, leaving me tongue-tied. Satisfied with my silence, Bernard returned
to his dribbling.

When the sun became
too strong, we walked to an ice-cream parlor a few blocks from the university.
Bernard ordered a chocolate sundae and began eating methodically, measuring out
the ice cream half a teaspoon at a time. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in
my chair.

“Auma tells me that you’re thinking about
trade school,” I said.

He nodded, his expression noncommittal.

“What kind of courses are you interested in?”

“I don’t know.” He dipped his spoon in his
sundae and thought for a moment. “Maybe auto mechanics.

Yes…I think auto mechanics is good.”

“Have you tried to get into some sort of
program?”

“No. Not really.” He stopped to take another bite. “You must pay fees.”“How old are you now, Bernard?”“Seventeen,” he said cautiously.

“Seventeen.” I
nodded, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “You know what that means, don’t you? It
means you’re almost a man. Somebody with responsibilities. To your family. To
yourself. What I’m trying to say is, it’s time you decided on something that
interested you. Could be auto mechanics. Could be something else. But whatever
it is, you’re gonna have to set some goals and follow through. Auma and I can
help you with school fees, but we can’t live your life for you. You’ve got to
put in some effort. You understand?”Bernard nodded. “I understand.”

We both sat in
silence for a while, watching Bernard’s spoon twirl through the now-liquid
mess. I began to imagine how hollow my words must be sounding to this brother
of mine, whose only fault was having been born on the wrong side of our
father’s cloven world. He didn’t resent me for this, it seemed. Not yet. Only
he must have been wondering why I was pretending that my rules somehow applied
to him. All he wanted was a few tokens of our relationship-Bob Marley
cassettes, maybe my basketball shoes once I was gone. So little to ask for, and
yet anything else that I offered-advice, scoldings, my ambitions for him-would
seem even less.

I stamped out my
cigarette and suggested we get going. As we stepped into the street, Bernard
draped his arm over my shoulder.

“It’s good to have a big brother around,” he
said before waving good-bye and vanishing into the crowd.

What is a family? Is
it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a
social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of
labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An
ambit of love? A reach across the void?

I could list various
possibilities. But I’d never arrived at a definite answer, aware early on that,
given my circumstances, such an effort was bound to fail. Instead, I drew a
series of circles around myself, with borders that shifted as time passed and
faces changed but that nevertheless offered the illusion of control. An inner
circle, where love was constant and claims unquestioned. Then a second circle,
a realm of negotiated love, commitments freely chosen. And then a circle for colleagues,
acquaintances; the cheerful gray-haired lady who rang up my groceries back in
Chicago. Until the circle finally widened to embrace a nation or a race, or a
particular moral course, and the commitments were no longer tied to a face or a
name but were actually commitments I’d made to myself.

In Africa, this
astronomy of mine almost immediately collapsed. For family seemed to be
everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets and in the parks, all of
them fussing and fretting over Obama’s longlost son. If I mentioned in passing
that I needed a notebook or shaving cream, I could count on one of my aunts to
insist that she take me to some far-off corner of Nairobi to find the best
bargains, no matter how long the trip took or how much it might inconvenience
her.

“Ah, Barry…what is more important than
helping my brother’s son?”

If a cousin
discovered, much to his distress, that Auma had left me to fend for myself, he
might walk the two miles to Auma’s apartment on the off chance that I was there
and needed company.

“Ah, Barry, why didn’t you call on me? Come,
I will take you to meet some of my friends.”

And in the evenings,
well, Auma and I simply surrendered ourselves to the endless invitations that
came our way from uncles, nephews, second cousins or cousins once removed, all
of whom demanded, at the risk of insult, that we sit down for a meal, no matter
what time it happened to be or how many meals we had already eaten.

“Ah, Barry…we may
not have much in Kenya-but so long as you are here, you will always have
something to eat!”

At first I reacted
to all this attention like a child to its mother’s bosom, full of simple,
unquestioning gratitude. It conformed to my idea of Africa and Africans, an
obvious contrast to the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I
understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we
sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here-as in the kampongs
outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece-remained
essentially intact: the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy
of human warmth.

As the days wore on,
though, my joy became tempered with tension and doubt. Some of it had to do
with what Auma had talked about that night in the car-an acute awareness of my
relative good fortune, and the troublesome questions such good fortune implied.
Not that our relatives were suffering, exactly. Both Jane and Zeituni had
steady jobs; Kezia made do selling cloth in the markets. If cash got too short,
the children could be sent upcountry for a time; that’s where another brother,
Abo, was staying, I was told, with an uncle in Kendu Bay, where there were
always chores to perform, food on the table and a roof over one’s head.

Still, the situation
in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher. Clothes were mostly secondhand, a
doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s
younger members were unemployed, including the two or three who had managed,
against stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If
Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid them off,
there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people
burdened by similar hardship.

Now I was family, I
reminded myself; now I had responsibilities. But what did that mean exactly?
Back in the States, I’d been able to translate such feelings into politics,
organizing, a certain self-denial. In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly
abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help
find Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new
set of sheets. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply
about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable
peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my
new relatives imagined for me: a corporate lawyer, an American businessman, my
hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the
Western world.

But of course I
wasn’t either of those things. Even in the States, wealth involved trade-offs
for those who weren’t born to it, the same sorts of trade-offs that I could see
Auma now making as she tried, in her own way, to fulfill the family’s
expectations. She was working two jobs that summer, teaching German classes to
Kenyan businessmen along with her job at the university. With the money she
saved, she wanted not only to fix up Granny’s house in Alego but also to buy a
bit of land around Nairobi, something that would appreciate in value, a base
from which to build. She had plans, schedules, budgets, and deadlines-all the
things she’d learned were required to negotiate a modern world. The problem was
that her schedules also meant begging off from family affairs; her budgets
meant saying no to the constant requests for money that came her way. And when
this happened-when she insisted on going home before Jane served dinner because
things had started two hours late, or when she refused to let eight people pile
into her VW because it was designed for four and they would tear up the
seats-the looks of unspoken hurt, barely distinguishable from resentment, would
flash across the room. Her restlessness, her independence, her constant
willingness to project into the future-all of this struck the family as
unnatural somehow. Unnatural…and unAfrican.

It was the same
dilemma that old Frank had posed to me the year I left Hawaii, the same
tensions that certain children in Altgeld might suffer if they took too much
pleasure in doing their schoolwork, the same perverse survivor’s guilt that I
could expect to experience if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the
throngs of young black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office.
Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our
success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact
that left me so unsettled-the fact that even here, in Africa, the same
maddening patterns still held sway; that no one here could tell me what my
blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger
idea of human association. It was as if we-Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I-were all
making it up as we went along. As if the map that might have once measured the
direction and force of our love, the code that would unlock our blessings, had
been lost long ago, buried with the ancestors beneath a silent earth.

Toward the end of my
first week in Nairobi, Zeituni took me to visit our other aunt, Sarah. Auma had
remained unwilling to go, but because it turned out that her mechanic lived
near Sarah, she offered to give us a ride to her garage; from there, she said,
we could travel by foot. On Saturday morning, Auma and I picked up Zeituni and
headed east, past cinder-block apartments and dry, garbage-strewn lots, until
we finally came to the rim of a wide valley known as Mathare. Auma pulled off
to the shoulder and I looked out the window to see the shantytown below, miles
and miles of corrugated rooftops shimmering under the sun like wet lily pads,
buckling and dipping in an unbroken sequence across the valley floor.

“How many people live there?” I asked.

Auma shrugged and turned to our aunt. “What
would you say, Auntie? Half a million, maybe?”

Zeituni shook her head. “That was last week.
This week, it must be one million.”

Auma started the car
back up. “Nobody knows for sure, Barack. The place is growing all the time.
People come in from the countryside looking for work and end up staying permanently.
For a while, the city council tried to tear the settlement down. They said it
was a health hazard-an affront to Kenya’s image, you see. Bulldozers came, and
people lost what little they had. But of course, they had nowhere else to go.
As soon as the bulldozers left, people rebuilt just like before.”

We came to a stop in
front of a slanting tin shed where a mechanic and several apprentices emerged
to look Auma’s car over. Promising to be back in an hour, Zeituni and I left
Auma at the garage and began our walk down a wide, unpaved road. It was already
hot, the road bereft of shade; on either side were rows of small hovels, their
walls a patchwork of wattle, mud, pieces of cardboard, and scavenged plywood.
They were neat, though, the packed earth in front of each home cleanly swept,
and everywhere we could see tailors and shoe repairers and furniture makers
plying their trades out of roadside stalls, and women and children selling
vegetables from wobbly wood tables.

Eventually we came
to one edge of Mathare, where a series of concrete buildings stood along a
paved road. The buildings were eight, maybe twelve stories tall, and yet
curiously unfinished, the wood beams and rough cement exposed to the elements,
like they’d suffered an aerial bombardment. We entered one of them, climbed a
narrow flight of stairs, and emerged at the end of a long unlit hallway, at the
other end of which we saw a teenage girl hanging out clothes to dry on a small
cement patio. Zeituni went to talk to the girl, who led us wordlessly to a low,
scuffed door. We knocked, and a dark, middle-aged woman appeared, short but
sturdily built, with hard, glassy eyes set in a wide, rawboned face. She took
my hand and said something in Luo.

“She says she is
ashamed to have her brother’s son see her in such a miserable place,” Zeituni
translated.

We were shown into a
small room, ten feet by twelve, large enough to fit a bed, a dresser, two
chairs, and a sewing machine. Zeituni and I each took one of the chairs, and
the young woman who had shown us Sarah’s room returned with two warm sodas.
Sarah sat on the bed and leaned forward to study my face. Auma had said that
Sarah knew some English, but she spoke mostly in Luo now. Even without the
benefit of Zeituni’s translation, I guessed that she wasn’t happy.

“She wants to know
why you have taken so long to visit her,” Zeituni explained. “She says that she
is the eldest child of your grandfather, Hussein Onyango, and that you should
have come to see her first.”“Tell her
I meant no disrespect,” I said, looking at Sarah but not sure what she
understood.

“Everything’s been so busy since my
arrival-it was hard to come sooner.”

Sarah’s tone became sharp. “She says that the
people you stay with must be telling you lies.”

“Tell her that I’ve
heard nothing said against her. Tell her that the dispute about the Old Man’s
estate has just made Auma uncomfortable about coming here.”

Sarah snorted after
the translation and started up again, her voice rumbling against the close
walls. When she finally stopped, Zeituni remained quiet.

“What’d she say, Zeituni?”

Zeituni’s eyes
stayed on Sarah as she answered my question. “She says the trial is not her
fault. She says that it’s Kezia’s doing-Auma’s mum. She says that the children
who claim to be Obama’s are not

Obama’s. She says they have taken
everything of his and left his true people living like beggars.”

Sarah nodded, and
her eyes began to smolder. “Yes, Barry,” she said suddenly in English. “It is
me who looks after your father when he is a small boy. My mother, Akumu, is
also your father’s mother. Akumu is your true grandmother, not this one you
call Granny. Akumu, the woman who gives your father life-you should be helping
her. And me, your brother’s sister. Look how I live. Why don’t you help us,
instead of these others?”

Before I could
answer, Zeituni and Sarah began to argue with each other in Luo. Eventually,
Zeituni stood up and straightened her skirt. “We should go now, Barry.”

I began to rise out of my chair, but Sarah
took my hand in both of hers, her voice softening.

“Will you give me something? For your
grandmother?”

I reached for my
wallet and felt the eyes of both aunts as I counted out the money I had on
me-perhaps thirty dollars’ worth of shillings. I pressed them into Sarah’s dry,
chapped hands, and she quickly slipped the money down the front of her blouse
before clutching my hand again.

“Stay here, Barry,” Sarah said. “You must
meet-”

“You can come back later, Barry,” Zeituni
said. “Let’s go.”

Outside, a hazy
yellow light bathed the road; my clothes hung limp against my body in the
windless heat. Zeituni was quiet now, visibly upset. She was a proud woman,
this aunt; the scene with Sarah must have embarrassed her. And then, that
thirty dollars-Lord knows, she could have used it herself….

We had walked for ten minutes before I asked
Zeituni what she and Sarah had been arguing about.

“Ah, it’s nothing,
Barry. This is what happens to old women who have no husbands.” Zeituni tried
to smile, but the tension creased the corners of her mouth.

“Come on, Auntie. Tell me the truth.”

Zeituni shook her
head. “I don’t know the truth. At least not all of it. I know that even growing
up, Sarah was always closer to her real mum, Akumu. Barack, he cared only for
my mum, Granny, the one who raised them after Akumu left.”

“Why did Akumu leave?”

“I’m not sure. You will have to ask Granny
about that.”

Zeituni signaled for
us to cross the street, then resumed talking. “You know, your father and Sarah
were actually very similar, even though they did not always get along. She was
smart like him. And independent. She used to tell me, when we were children,
that she wanted to get an education so that she would not have to depend on any
man. That’s why she ended up married to four different husbands. None of them
lasted. The first one died, but the others she left, because they were lazy, or
tried to abuse her. I admire her for this. Most women in Kenya put up with
anything. I did, for a long time. But Sarah also paid a price for her
independence.”

Zeituni wiped the
sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first
husband died, she decided that your father should support her and her child,
since he had received all the education. That’s why she disliked Kezia and her
children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take
everything. You must understand, Barry-in Luo custom, the male child inherits
everything. Sarah feared that once your grandfather died, everything would
belong to Barack and his wives, and she would be left with nothing.”

I shook my head. “That’s no excuse for lying
about who the Old Man’s children are.”

“You’re right. But…”“But what?”

Zeituni stopped
walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with
his American wife, Ruth…well, he would go to Kezia sometimes. You must
understand that traditionally she was still his wife. It was during such a
visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The
thing was, Kezia also lived with another man briefly during this time. So when
she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who-” Zeituni stopped,
letting the thought finish itself.

“Does Bernard know about this?”

“Yes, he knows by
now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would
say that they were all his children. He drove this other man away, and would
give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But once he died, there
was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them in this way.”

We turned a corner
onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scuttered out
of the path of an oncoming matatu. Across the way, two little girls in dusty
red school uniforms, their round heads shaven almost clean, held hands and sang
as they skipped across a gutter. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl
motioned to us to look at her wares: two margarine tins of dried beans, a neat
stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a chain of silver coins.
I looked into the old woman’s face, drawn beneath the shadows. Who was this
woman? I wondered. My grandmother? A stranger? And what about Bernard-should my
feelings for him somehow be different now? I looked over at a bus stop, where a
crowd of young men were streaming out into the road, all of them tall and black
and slender, their bones pressing against their shirts. I suddenly imagined
Bernard’s face on all of them, multiplied across the landscape, across
continents. Hungry, striving, desperate men, all of them my brothers….

“Now you see what your father suffered.”

“What?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to
find my aunt staring at me.

“Yes, Barry, your
father suffered,” she repeated. “I am telling you, his problem was that his
heart was too big. When he lived, he would just give to everybody who asked
him. And they all asked. You know, he was one of the first in the whole
district to study abroad. The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone
else who had ridden in an airplane before. So they expected everything from
him. ‘Ah, Barack, you are a big shot now. You should give me something. You
should help me.’ Always these pressures from family. And he couldn’t say no, he
was so generous. You know, even me he had to take care of when I became
pregnant, he was very disappointed in me. He had wanted me to go to college.
But I would not listen to him, and went off with my husband. And despite this
thing, when my husband became abusive and I had to leave, no money, no job, who
do you think took me in? Yes-it was him. That’s why, no matter what others
sometimes say, I will always be grateful to him.”

We were approaching
the garage shop; up ahead, we could see Auma talking to her mechanic and hear
the engine of the old VW whine. Beside us, a naked boy, maybe three years old,
wandered out from behind a row of oil drums, his feet caked with what looked
like tar. Again Zeituni stopped, this time as if suddenly ill, and spat into
the dust.

“When your father’s
luck changed,” she said, “these same people he had helped, they forgot him.
They laughed at him. Even family refused to have him stay in their houses. Yes,
Barry! Refused! They would tell Barack it was too dangerous. I knew this hurt
him, but he wouldn’t pass blame. Your father never held a grudge. In fact, when
he was rehabilitated and doing well again, I would find out that he was giving
help to these same people who had betrayed him. Ah, I could not understand this
thing. I would tell him, ‘Barack, you should only look after yourself and your
children! These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to
work for themselves.’ And you know what he would say to me? He would say, ‘How
do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?’”

My aunt turned away
and, forcing a smile, waved to Auma. And as we began to walk forward, she
added, “I tell you this so you will know the pressure your father was under in
this place. So you don’t judge him too harshly. And you must learn from his
life. If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have
to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your
father, he never understood this, I think.”

I remember a
conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a
woman who’d grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three
sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about
her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her
mother’s vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and
the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby.
Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d
mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman’s mind they had
remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two
sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who
soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a
vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices
shaping the course of her dreams.

So now it was for
me. I remember how, a few days after my visit to Sarah’s, Auma and I happened
to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could
tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced
myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my-you have grown so tall. How’s your
mother? And your brother Mark-has he graduated from university yet?”

At first I was
confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that
no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a
different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all
sides-the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another
look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear
as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me
standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a
ghost.

Later, back in her
apartment, I asked Auma when she had last seen Mark and Ruth. She leaned her
head against my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling.

“David’s funeral,” she said. “Although by
then they had stopped speaking to us for a long time.”“Why?”

“I told you that
Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man was very bitter. After they separated, she
married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his name. She sent them to an
international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that
they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”

Auma sighed. “I
don’t know. Maybe because he was older, Mark came to share Ruth’s attitudes and
had no contact with us after that. But for some reason, once David was a
teenager, he began to rebel against Ruth. He told her he was an African, and
started calling himself Obama. Sometimes he would sneak off from school to
visit the Old Man and the rest of the family, which is how we got to know him.
He became everybody’s favorite. He was so sweet, you know, and funny, even if
he was sometimes too wild.

“Ruth tried to
enroll him in a boarding school, hoping it would settle him down. But David
ended up running away instead. Nobody saw him for months. Then Roy happened to
bump into him outside a rugby match. He was dirty, thin, begging money from
strangers. He laughed when he saw Roy, and bragged about his life on the
streets, hustling bhang with his friends. Roy told him to go home, but he
refused, so Roy took David to his own apartment, sending word to Ruth that her
son was safe and staying with him. When Ruth heard this, she was relieved but
also furious. She begged David to come back, but when he again refused, she
tacitly accepted the arrangement with Roy, hoping that eventually David would
change his mind.”

Auma
sipped on her tea. “That’s when David died. While he was living with Roy. His
death broke everybody’s heart-Roy’s especially. The two of them were really
close, you see. But Ruth never understood that. She thought we had corrupted
David. Stolen her baby away. And I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us for it.”

I decided to stop
talking about David after that; I could tell that Auma found the memories too
painful. But only a few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting
for us outside the apartment. The driver, a brown-skinned man with a prominent
Adam’s apple, handed Auma a note.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s an invitation
from Ruth,” she said. “Mark’s back from America for the summer. She wants to
have us over for lunch.”

“Do you want to go?”

Auma shook her head,
a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months
now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because
she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”

“I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.

Auma looked at the
note again, then handed it back to the driver and said something to him in
Swahili.

“We’ll both go,” she said, and
walked into the apartment.

Ruth lived in
Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended
hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. It was
raining as we drove toward her house, sending a soft, gentle spray through the
big, leafy trees. The coolness reminded me of the streets around Punahou,
Manoa, Tantalus, the streets where some of my wealthier classmates had lived
back in Hawaii. Staring out Auma’s car window, I thought back to the envy I’d
felt toward those classmates whenever they invited me over to play in their big
backyards or swim in their swimming pools. And along with that envy, a
different impression-the sense of quiet desperation those big, pretty houses
seemed to contain. The sound of someone’s sister crying softly behind the door.
The sight of a mother sneaking a tumbler of gin in midafternoon. The expression
on a father’s face as he sat alone in his den, his features clenched as he
flicked between college football games on TV. An impression of loneliness that perhaps
wasn’t true, perhaps was just a projection of my own heart, but that, either
way, had made me want to run, just as, an ocean away, David had run, back into
the marketplace and noisy streets, back into disorder and the laughter disorder
produced, back into the sort of pain a boy could understand.

We came to one of
the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping
driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house
to meet us. Behind her was a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy
Afro and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Come in, come in,”
Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room,
where a balding, older black man in a safari jacket was bouncing a young boy on
his lap. “This is my husband,” Ruth said, “and this is Mark’s little brother,
Joey.”

“Hey, Joey,” I said,
bending down to shake his hand. He was a beautiful boy, with honey-colored skin
and two front teeth missing. Ruth tousled the boy’s big curls, then looked at
her husband and said, “Weren’t you two on your way to the club?”

“Yes,
yes,” the man said, standing up. “Come on, Joey…it was nice to meet you both.”
The boy stood fast, staring up at Auma and me with a bright, curious smile
until his father finally picked him up and carried him out the door.

“Well, here we are,”
Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was
quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had
to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it?
But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”

I smiled as if I
hadn’t understood the question. “So, Mark,” I said, turning to my brother, “I
hear you’re at Berkeley.”

“Stanford,” he
corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. “I’m in my last
year of the physics program there.”

“It must be tough,” Auma offered.Mark shrugged. “Not really.”

“Don’t be so modest,
dear,” Ruth said. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of
people really understand it all.” She patted Mark on the hand, then turned to
me. “And Barry, I understand you’ll be going to Harvard. Just like Obama. You
must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You
know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever
meet him? Obama, I mean?”

“Only once. When I was ten.”

“Well, you were lucky then. It probably
explains why you’re doing so well.”

That’s how the next
hour passed, with Ruth alternating between stories of my father’s failure and
stories of Mark’s accomplishments. Any questions were directed exclusively to
me, leaving Auma to fiddle silently with Ruth’s lasagna. I wanted to leave as
soon as the meal was over, but Ruth suggested that Mark show us the family
album while she brought out the dessert.

We followed Mark to
the bookcase, and he pulled down a large photo album. Together we sat on the
couch, slowly thumbing through laminate pages. Auma and Roy, dark and skinny
and tall, all legs and big eyes, holding the two smaller children protectively
in their arms. The Old Man and Ruth mugging it up at a beach somewhere. The
entire family dressed up for a night out on the town. They were happy scenes,
all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some
alternative universe that had played itself out behind my back. They were
reflections, I realized, of my own long-held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept
secret even from myself. The fantasy of the Old Man’s having taken my mother
and me back with him to Kenya. The wish that my mother and father, sisters and
brothers, were all under one roof. Here it was, I thought, what might have
been. And the recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh
evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad that after only a
few minutes I had to look away.

On the drive back, I apologized to Auma for
having put her through the ordeal. She waved it off.

“It could have been
worse,” she said. “I feel sorry for Mark, though. He seems so alone. You know,
it’s not easy being a mixed child in Kenya.”

I
looked out the window, thinking about my mother, Toot, and Gramps, and how
grateful I was to themfor who they were, and for the stories they’d told. I
turned back to Auma, and said, “She still hasn’t gotten over him, has she?”

“Who?”

“Ruth. She hasn’t gotten over the Old Man.”

Auma thought for a moment. “No, Barack. I
guess she hasn’t. Just like the rest of us.”

The following week,
I called Mark and suggested that we go out to lunch. He seemed a bit hesitant,
but eventually agreed to meet me at an Indian restaurant downtown. He was more
relaxed than he had been during our first meeting, making a few self-deprecatory
jokes, offering his observations about California and academic infighting. As
the meal wore on, I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

“Fine,” he said.
“It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. And Joey-he’s really a great kid.”
Mark cut off a bite of his samosa and put it into his mouth. “As for the rest
of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African
country.”“You don’t ever think about
settling here?”

Mark took a sip from
his Coke. “No,” he said. “I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is
there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”

I should have
stopped then, but something-the certainty in this brother’s voice, maybe, or
our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror-made me want to push
harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?”

Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the
first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

“I understand what
you’re getting at,” he said flatly. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my
roots, that sort of thing.” He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his
plate. “Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think
about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I
knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That
was enough.”

“It made you mad.”

“Not mad. Just numb.”

“And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I
mean?”

“Towards him, no.
Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I knowit’s
not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I
should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half
Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means.
About who I really am.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can
acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I
would…”

For the briefest
moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then,
almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

“Who knows?” he
said. “What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough
without all that excess baggage.”

We stood up to
leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and
promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache. When I got home,
I told Auma how the meeting had gone. She looked away for a moment, then broke
out with a short, bitter laugh.“What’s
so funny?”

“I was just thinking
about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old Man died, the
lawyers contacted all those who might have a claim to the inheritance. Unlike
my mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was. So of
all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only one that’s uncontested.”

Again Auma laughed,
and I looked up at the picture hanging on her wall, the same picture pasted
inside Ruth’s album, of three brothers and a sister, smiling sweetly for the
camera.